Yesterday’s Gospel is also Sunday’s Gospel, but before I write about that, I need to explain about Freaked Out Jesus.

When we speak, it is not only our words that convey the meaning of our message. Our tone of voice, facial expressions, general demeanor, all these clarify the real meaning of our words. Start with this statement: “I’m looking for my son.”

It means something completely different, depending on my tone. Frantic? Furious? Bored? Amused? If I’m standing at the sink doing dishes while he’s calling out from the closet for me to come find him, it means I am not looking for my son. As in, maybe he’ll stay in the closet five minutes and I can get these dishes done.

The Gospels almost never give us this extra information to go with the words of Jesus. Which means that for much of the Gospels , we the readers have to fill in the missing information ourselves. There can be no “neutral” reading – put the dialog into a flat, expressionless tone, and you’ve gone and set a very particular (and unlikely) mood.

What readers today seem to do the most, though, is use the words as stage cues. Which doesn’t always work – if Jesus says He’s “tired” of something, is he angry, frustrated, bored, or about to fall asleep? What I see most as a result of this method is what I call Freaked Out Jesus. We put the most forceful literal spin on his words, as if Jesus were marching through Galilee reacting in extremes at every wacky thing the mortals do.

I don’t think this works, and the reason is the people I grew up with. Bearing the brunt of one of our childish antics, my maternal grandmother would say: “I could wring your neck.” My father would say, “God bless it all.”

Now you who have lived in my time and place may know exactly what those two expressions mean and how they were conveyed. But pretend for a moment that you used the Freaked Out method of literal interpretation to add tone and meaning to the words. You’d make my grandmother out to be a homicidal maniac. The children spill a pound of sugar on the floor, and she’s ready to strangle them! You envision wild eyes, grasping hands, children fleeing in terror. And then my father, in contrast, watching the dog eat the meatloaf someone knocked off the table, is smiling beatifically, praising Jesus in mild, thankful tones for the wonderful gift of family life.

No. My grandmother would say, “I could wring your neck”, and she’d be laughing. Children are children. They make good stories. My father would bellow “God bless it all!”, and trust me, it wasn’t a blessing. [For the record, my dad is a great guy. But yeah, when he’s mad, he YELLS. And then he’s over it. He’s a wonderful father in his own special loud way.]

And those two are my argument against the Freaked Out method of reading the Gospels. When Peter starts to slip into the water out on the sea, and Jesus says, “Oh you of little faith,” do you really think He’s belittling the apostle? That’s how it usually gets interpreted. But what if Jesus were patient and kind? What if He were pleased with Peter’s efforts however small (and walking on water is not so small), and as He helped Peter up, He wanted to provide encouragement and guidance? What if Jesus had a sense of humor? Is it possible He was sort of chuckling to Himself and giving Peter a pat on the back as they got into the boat?

The Gospels don’t say. We have to use clues to fill in the missing information as best we can. And that’s where I’m going in the next post on Pagans & Tax Collectors. Because I think that the Gospels do give us clues on how Jesus feels about them, and how He wants us to treat them. And by extension, how he wants us to treat dissenting and openly sinning members of the Church.

Continuing with the NFP theme . . .

If you travel in the right circles, soon enough you run up against “providentialists”.   You might see a reference to “Quiverfull” or “Full Quiver”, or “Letting God Plan Your Family”, or any number of things.  The basic idea is this:  Married couples should take no measure to avoid pregnancy in any way.

There are variations, and I won’t go into the crazier minorities.  Also, we aren’t talking here about couples who take no steps to space or delay pregnancy because they have no reason to do so.  That is normal and healthy.  If you are a married couple, the default mode is “hope for another baby”.

What I want to address today is the idea that maybe NFP is wrong.  That maybe, observing your signs of fertility, and actively choosing to avoid intercourse during the fertile time, is somehow not what God wants.  That by doing so you are not trusting God.  You are perhaps taking into your own hands something that should remain a mystery.  And that what God wants is for couples to go ahead and engage in marital relations with no regard for whether or not a pregnancy will result, even when all indicators are that a pregnancy at this time would be a very, very bad thing.

This is not Catholic.  And it doesn’t work.  Here’s why:

God gives us free will, and He means us to use it.  Let us set out an ideal of complete, childlike trust in God.  Now ask: Does that mean that you want your children to be automatons?  No.  I want my children to trust in me, to obey me, to do what I have taught them even when it doesn’t make sense.  But my goodness if the house is on fire,  all those years of “don’t get out of bed after bedtime” give way to the other training of “kick through the screen and climb out the window, I’ll meet you at the neighbor’s house”.   God gives us the faculty to think, to plan, to control our actions.  We are not dogs in heat.  We trust in Him, but we still check the classifieds when we need a job.

We aren’t meant to dwell in ignorance of the wonders of the universe.  And that includes human biology.  I don’t show my “trust” in God by refusing to learn more about the world He created.  It would be bizarre and unnatural for me to insist on complete ignorance of the very obvious signs of human fertility.

Our emotions and desires provide valuable information.  And they cannot be forced.  Although we should not be ruled by our feelings, when they are properly ordered they are essential to making prudent decisions.  What sane man could look at the faces of his hungry children and not be filled the notion that his first and foremost mission is to find a way to feed them?  That other things must wait.  What loving husband could look at his sick wife, and not want to first do what he could to protect her health, and choose to set aside his own natural urges for her sake?    In the face of serious reasons to postpone pregnancy, the normal, healthy response is to have a diminished desire for intercourse.

So “providentialism” simply does not work.  At it’s logical extreme, it asks us to abandon our role as creatures made in the image of God.  To set aside our free will, to insist on willful ignorance of the basic and obvious workings of creation, and to cultivate an animal-like desire for intercourse instead of responding to the normal, healthy instinct to put the good of others before our own pleasure.  In face of serious reasons to avoid pregnancy, abstinence — whether 100% or intermittently as required — is a natural, noble, and moral means of sacrificing for the good of the family.

That said, the practice proposed by “providentialism” is in fact the default mode for married couples.  It is normal for married couples to engage in intercourse at will, and joyfully welcome whatever children come their way.    It is only when serious situations arise that one would actually want or need to choose another course of action.  But in those situations, NFP is a sane response.

The biggest complaint about NFP is that it stinks not being able to have sex with your spouse.  The rest of the method — observing and charting and all of that — may not be the funnest thing ever, but it beats having surgery or putting weird chemicals into your body, and compared to all the other things parents do, really it’s no big deal.  But not having sex with your spouse?  That stinks.

And so people complain, rightly, “We shouldn’t have to abstain.”

No, you shouldn’t.

We live in a fallen world.  There should be no hunger, no murder, no sickness, no death.  But there is.  Not because there should be, not because these things are right and natural and all part of what man was made for, but because our world is broken, and the ultimate fix is for the next life, not this one.

“We shouldn’t have to abstain” is also the argument for contraception.  Couples instinctively know that their calling is for intimacy and physical union.  They mistakenly conclude that whatever enables intercourse is therefore good.

The mistake is in thinking that sex can be separated from procreation.  If I have this sense that as a couple we ought to be engaging in intercourse at will, and if a pregnancy would cause a serious problem at this time, the conclusion of contraception is that I ought to keep the sex but avoid the pregnancy.

NFP says: No.  The two cannot be separated.  If pregnancy needs to be avoided, then intercourse will have to avoided, because you may not separate sex from procreation.  (Nor procreation from sex.)  The way in which we bring into the world new eternal souls is sacred.  It is set apart.

The trouble is that in promoting NFP, we mistakenly compare it to contraception.  It is as effective for avoiding pregnancy.  It is as easy to master.  And, sometimes you will be told, “Well, it’s only a few days a month that you need to avoid”.  In other words, you’ll hardly notice.

And we think therefore that NFP should involve no suffering.  No difficulty.  Because that is what contraception claims: Have all the free sex you want!  The free sex you surely need!  It pains you, as a married couple to abstain!  Surely your marriage requires sex at will, right?

What we forget, is that NFP is only there as a response to a serious problem.

If the world were not broken, there would be no NFP.  Couples would marry, and children would come.  There would be no infertility, no miscarriages, no stillbirths.  No pregnancy complications.  No breastfeeding difficulties, nor pregnancies too close one after the other.  No health problems that limited how many children one could bear and rear.  No concern about feeding or caring for or sheltering the children.  No mental health disorders.  None of these countless ways that many couples find they cannot simply have sex at will, for the world is broken.

NFP seeks to lighten the load.  It seeks to lessen the suffering that this broken world imparts.  But like a kindly nurse in the ICU, or a compassionate police officer at the scene of the crime, nothing can erase the underlying World Gone Wrong.   If I’m using NFP, it means there is some kind of problem in my life.

The suffering is not imaginary.  It is not particularly surprising, even.  It’s a broken world.  NFP is a moral means to take the edge off the pain, but it’s still a broken world.